Shipping Policy – Customer Preferences

What kind of shipping policy should I offer?

What shipping options you give to your customers can greatly impact how you run your business. Contrary to popular belief, giving your customers every shipping option in the world across all carriers isn’t always the smartest route to go. Giving real-time shipping rates to customers can give them sticker shock when they see that shipping a heavy order overnight to their house across the country is $70, or they won’t know the difference between something like Priority Mail and Priority Mail Express.

So what’s the best option to give your customers? The answer is: It depends. A simple, functional shipping policy can do wonders for your store’s checkout funnel if your product mix is fairly straightforward and doesn’t contain a large variance in product size/weight. Customers appreciate a straightforward shipping policy, and you can even incentivize visitors to make a bigger order if you offer them free or discounted shipping if they hit a certain purchase threshold.

Even with this, there are many capabilities you can offer to customers in terms of how they want their order shipped, and it doesn’t stop after they click purchase.

The shipping needs of customers today

Customers increasingly look for the ability to have orders split between addresses, to have items with different fulfillment times consolidated into a single delivery, to ship to locations other than their home address, and to change delivery dates or have packages rerouted once shipped.

Select the optimal carrier for the actual packages that need to be shipped

Generate related pick list and packing slip(s)

Physical Environment – Allows you to:

Route package to the best carrier

A strong shipping policy and knowing the implications of your offerings can make your business seem very professional and drastically improve the customer experience, especially the checkout funnel and receiving their orders in person.